Journey to the center of the mind

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” asked the elderly gentleman as he surveyed me from behind a pile of books. I looked up and into his dull grey eyes. William James had died at the age of 68. He looked much older though and very tired. I had called upon him at an unearthly or rather deathly hour for some assistance and after a bit of resistance and plenty of hesitation, he had agreed to help.

“I have to do this. It's the only way”, I said.
He shut the book before him with a thud that sent dust into the air. He coughed slowly and strenuously while I waited for him to say something.
“It’s not the only way. But it is a way! The toughest, if I may add.”

He drew out a piece of paper from his coat, scribbled across it and handed it to me. “People have journeyed to continents afar"
“Also to the moon and Mars”, I added.
“So I’ve heard,” he said with a look of disbelief, “but very few embark upon a journey to the center of their mind.”

“You did”, I said.
"“I tried!”

I unfurled the note and read the untidy words scribbled across it.
“Anything you may hold firmly in your imagination can be yours.”

I looked up at him. But he was gone. And so was the old study we had been sitting in. I was now elsewhere, in a laboratory and completely alone. The sudden burst of light made my eyes water. William James' study had been dull and the laboratory was almost like a hundred spotlights had converged over me.

The door to the laboratory opened and a young man entered.
“Are you here for the mind mission ?” He asked.
“Yes”
He fixed his dark eyes at me. They carried an interesting mix of curiosity and concern. He smoothened his handsome features quickly.

“You look surprised? Were you not expecting me?” I asked.
“The only people who visit this facility are older men, and you’re well,—"
“A woman?”
“Young,” he said with a half smile.
I was growing a bit uncomfortable at the scrutiny. He may have sensed it because he quickly added, “shall we begin?”

I nodded.
He handed me a file. “But first, You’ll have to sign this."
“What’s this?”
“Terms and conditions,” he said.
I skimmed through it quickly and noticed clause 4 which said: “We are not responsible if the outcome of your visit thrusts your mind into a downward spiral of madness.”
“Very convenient, don't you think?” I asked.
“It’s a legal necessity” he replied.
I signed the agreement and handed it back to him.
“I’ll descend into madness if I don’t have the answers,” I said.

“Very well then, my assistants will sedate your mind. You’ll lose consciousness for a while. But you will wake up. Perhaps a different person. Perhaps wiser?”
I nodded and forced a smile.

“The next time I see you, we will be someplace else,” he said as a few assistants helped me onto a chair. They placed huge equipment around my face.

“I didn’t catch your name Sir,” said I as he made his way to the exit.
“You can call me the Doctor,” he said as he walked out.

When I opened my eyes, I was at school. The campus was desolate though and it was unusually chilly. It was nearing sundown. Not a very usual time to be hanging around at school.

“You took a while to get here,” said a voice that startled me. I turned around. The Doctor was leaning against the wall of the main building with a slim file in one hand. He wore an amused smile.

“Why are we at my school?” I asked.
“You tell me. You’ve chosen the place” said he.
“Is my mind always here?”
“Not always. It wanders and chooses places where it feels safe. Today we are here. It may change though.”

“I felt safe at school?” I ask bewildered at the revelation.
“Looks like it. But the place doesn’t matter. The setting is a ruse. This could change to an ancestral home, a nursery, a riverside. These are your happy places."

"What else is my happy place?"
The Doctor looked over into the file and said, "A playground, a chapel, a very specific corner in a friend's house, Time's Square."

"What?"
"The setting doesn't matter. Now we are at your school. This is just the surface! We’re here to see the dungeons."

“There were no dungeons in my school.”

“No there weren’t. But there are in your mind.” He pointed at a stairwell leading into darkness and said: "shall we?"

I followed him closely. The air was musty and static. The stench of fish began to loom upon us. “Are we nearing some pond with dead fish?” I asked.
“No”, he replied unhelpfully.

The fish stench reduced and was soon replaced with the smell of burning firewood. “I don’t like this place”, I said.
“Clearly”, said he.
The walls were caving in and I could see dark lizards on the walls. I grimaced at the sight of them.
“I can’t be here,” I said tugging at his sleeve.
“We must proceed” he insisted.
I focused ahead and avoided looking at the walls.

The tunnel ended with a door. Scratched across it were the words, “Beware of thoughts.”

The Doctor surveyed me, “You are dramatic, aren’t you?”
“I haven’t written that,” I said sheepishly.
He pushed forward the door and we both entered.

We were in a room which seemed to have no end. It stretched on for miles. The light was so dim that I could barely see a few steps ahead of me. Objects in a distance were out of focus.

“Is it always so dark in here?”
The Doctor chuckled. “You can make it brighter, you know”
“How?”
“By turning on the light.”
“Where’s the light switch?” said I looking around expecting to see one.
“We’ll get to that later. But first, you must see the monster.”

I looked at him with shock,
“The what now?”
“Monster! He will recognize you and he won’t like seeing you here. But he’s caged, as far as I can tell. So we need not worry”
“ITS A HE? I KNEW IT."
“Well, it has no gender. It’s an amalgamation of things. You’ll see.”
“How do you know it’s caged?”
“If it breaks free, you’ll descend into madness.”
"And I am not mad now?"
"Not entirely, no."

I felt uneasy. I didn’t want to see a monster. And definitely not the one I had created. But I had made it this far, it would be meaningless to quit now.

The Doctor and I began to walk down the dark room. I kept close to his heels and almost ran into him when he stopped.

I peered ahead into the darkness. In a distance was a cage, a flimsy one. Inside it was a gigantic figure. It had no definite shape. It had several heads but it would be absurd to call them heads. They were just shapes in the place where normally heads are found. It had eyes though. Yellow bright menacing eyes. It looked up at me and lunged forward with rage. I stumbled and fell back. The cage stopped it from devouring me.

“What is that thing? How did I create it?”
“That’s an amalgamation of repressed memories and feelings. It’s an amalgamation of all your fears and insecurities. It’s your nightmare.”

The doctor helped me up from the floor. “I cannot believe this”, I said looking at him, hoping he’d tell me this was a joke.

He looked at me sadness in his eyes. “The mind files away painful memories. Sweeps them under the rug. Overwrites over them. These feelings have nowhere to go. No outlet! So they accumulate and over time, take shape and then take residence in the inner recesses of the mind. This one here is an outcome of years of repressed feelings and memories. Unaddressed anxieties and unsolved questions.”
“Unbelievable!”
“Let me show you what it does,” said Doctor taking out a slim walkie-talkie from his overcoat. He mouthed into it,
“Expose body to cologne in bottle one."
He then turned out the talkie to show me a screen. The screen showed me in a sedated state with assistants all around.
“That’s me,” I said in disbelief.
“Yes. That’s your body at the laboratory.”
“Then what am I now?”
“A traveler.”
I watched the assistants spray the cologne in the air around me. My body remained still. But a sweet but overpowering scent filled the room. The monster in the cage went wild with fury and screamed. It wasn’t a scream of terror. It was a scream of pain. It began to sob or make incomprehensible sounds that sounded like sobbing.
“What did you spray in the air? Why is it crying?”

“We sprayed Paco Rabanne, does that ring a bell?”

I stepped back “My father would wear that scent.”
“And?”
“He abandoned us. Left us to fend for ourselves. I had forgotten that he wore that perfume .”

“A painful memory swept under the rug and into the dungeons.”
I stared at the monster with pity and contempt.
“It’s incredible what the mind can do. For instance, had you been in your body right now, you’d have overwritten the scent but because you’re here you allowed it to feel the pain fully. Which is why the monster raged and calmed.”
“I don’t understand.”

The doctor switched off the screen on his talkie and drew an invisible square in the air ahead of us.
“What are you doing?”
“Creating a mobile projection. Let me show you how you overwrite.”

The square in the air turned silver and flickered to life. It was like a television screen except that it looked so real. I saw myself on the screen. I was sitting on a bus with my earphones on and a blank expression. A man passed by me. The doctor paused the film and said: “here, you inhale the perfume.”

He pressed play and I noticed my expression change. My brows furrowed and my face fell. I watched as I unlocked my phone and changed the song I was listening to.

Doctor zoomed into my phone. “Can you see what you changed the song to?”
“Hotel California”, I read.

“Yes”
“This makes no sense.”
“Does it not? Who was the next man in your life? The man who made your father’s leaving less painful. What was his favorite song?”

“Oh my god.”
“It doesn’t end here though, does it? It triggers further memories.”
“Yes, my first boyfriend! He also hurt me.”

“Yes. So that song is now overwritten by something else. You seek fresh mud to bury the dead. But the stench remains."

“But don’t they say the best way to overcome pain it to distract yourself?”

“Absolutely not. Moreover we often get confused between occupying the mind and numbing the mind. One is good, the other feeds the monster.” 

“This is hard for me to understand."

“Everything, whether the smell of a cologne, a song, a movie, a memory, a place, a feeling, a conversation — all lead to the same place in your head. Your dungeons. Feelings that you haven't dealt with make their way here. Unaddressed and unattended to, they accumulate."

“So the monster keeps growing?” I said looking at the pitiable heap of objects that was breathing deeply.
“Yes. It accumulates and grows. It feeds on unaddressed pains. And it attacks you all at once.”

"What happens when it attacks?"
"Anxiety, depression, suicidal thoughts, a feeling of hopelessness, self-harming."

I was baffled at this revelation. “Can’t we control it?”
“That’s the catch. Controlling it doesn’t work. Controlling it leads to repressed feelings which make it grow. You have to face it. You have to fight it. You can’t tame it, although you’ve tried.”
“I have?”
“Alcohol, medicines, drugs, sex are all ways to overpower the monster or rather the rage it brings with it. But every time you overwrite, you make the situation worse. Substance abuse is merely a way to tranquilize temporarily a very permanent monster.” 

“Is there a way out?”
“Yes”
“What is it?”
The doctor switched on a flashlight and pointed it at the Monster. The monster growled and raged at the light. “You’ll have to make this monster weak. The only way to do that is to stop feeding it. You’ll have to address your feelings. You’ll have to walk the path fully to heal. There’s no shortcut. You can't drink your way out of a situation You cannot fuck your way back to normalcy. You can't replace a problem with another hoping you'll get over the first by occupying your mind with another. You are only creating layers of repression and making your monster grow."

Doctor switched off the flashlight and the darkness around me collapsed. I felt like I was falling. “Doctor?” I screamed and woke up with a start.

I was in the laboratory. The Doctor looked at me with concern.

“You’ve been away for a while.”
“How long was I gone?”
“7 hours."

A few assistants helped me off the chair and lead me to a separate room. I felt drained as if I had been running for miles. On a table before me, was a glass of water and a freshly cut guava. I ate it ravenously.

The Doctor joined me after a while and handed me a report. “Everything is in here. You should be proud. You’ve made progress. Most people don’t even begin.”

I thanked the doctor and opened the file with trembling hands.